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Report: Twitter ad revenues higher than expected on strong mobile numbers

Jeff John Roberts — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 15:13:56 +0000

A research firm predicts that Twitter will earn nearly $1 billion in advertising revenue in 2014, largely on the strength of mobile ad sales. The figure exceeds the firm’s earlier predictions and reflects Twitter’s ongoing emergence as a force in mobile marketing.

According to eMarketer, Twitter will pull in $528 million this year and $950 million in 2014 with 53 percent of that money coming from mobile ads. The firm had earlier pegged the 2014 number at $800 million.

There are two takeaways from these figures. One is the obvious observation that Twitter is killing it, and fulfilling predictions that it will become a media and advertising behemoth. The other is that Twitter is one of the only companies to crack the mobile morass — the problem, faced by many websites, in which users are moving to mobile devices but ad dollars are not.

Twitter is sitting pretty here because its mobile experience is highly conducive to so-called “native ad units” (sponsored or promoted tweets) that drop easily into its regular story flow. Twitter’s surging mobile numbers could also bode well for Facebook which is ramping up its own advertising efforts, and will likely expand options for marketers to drop “sponsored stories” (another type of native ad unit) into its mobile News Feed.

The other figure that jumps out from the eMarketer report is how much of Twitter’s ad money still comes from the U.S. The firm says that the figure was 90% in 2012 and predicts it will be 83% in 2013.

Twitter continues to hire high profile figures to drive advertising ambitions; in February, it announced the hiring of Jeffrey Graham, a Googler and former New York Times executive.

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Google has $8 billion in mobile revenue: is that good or bad?

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 22:27:38 +0000

Investors are watching Google closely to see if the company can adapt to a world where more and more searches take place on smartphones and in apps. Today, the company rolled out an impressive sounding figure but provided few details about what it means.

On an afternoon earnings call, Google announced it had a run rate of $8 billion from its mobile business, consisting of revenue from ads, apps and content.

CEO Larry Page, still hoarse from a voice problem that silenced him for months, stated that the vast majority of that mobile revenue came from ads and that mobile is a “significant portion” compared to desktop ads. He declined, however, to provide specific figures or to disclose the margins Google is making on apps and content in the Play store.

The CEO likewise deflected a question about whether desktop ad revenue had “flat-lined,” and declined to say whether it was a matter of quarters or years before mobile revenue caught up. He did, however, say that for now few people were using Google Chrome browser on their mobile device — implying that future broader adoption will trigger a new rush of ad revenue and e-commerce.

What all this means is that those trying to read Google’s mobile tea leaves will have to wait to learn whether the company really has adapted its search money machine for the smartphone era. The $8 billion figure could thus either represent more big time growth at Google or, alternately, the start of stagnation.

The call came after a disastrous morning in which Google spooked the market by mistakenly releasing its earnings four hours early and, worse, posting horrid results. Trading in the company’s shares was briefly halted and the shares ultimately lost $60, finishing the day down eight percent.

Page and the executives, however, remained relentlessly upbeat on the call, pointing to four macro-trends they claim will benefit Google: 1) the rise of the “multi-screen consumer” which will allow marketers to reach them closer to points of purchase; 2) the ability to deliver more precise shopping information to consumers; 3) Google’s ability to sell advertising across a growing number of “technology stacks,” including YouTube and Google+; 4) the company’s growing traction in cloud computing and enterprise products.

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Meet the world’s top 20 mobile carriers: Asia on the rise

Kevin Fitchard — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:44:59 +0000

Wireless Intelligence has compiled its annual ranking of global carriers by number of mobile connections, and not much has changed from last year’s list. China Mobile still dominates the list with nearly 700 million subscribers, and the composition of the remaining 19 is roughly the same, according to the analysis arm of the GSM Association. If there is an underlying trend visible, though, it’s that Asian operators are gradually displacing normally dominant Western operators.

Vodafone and Latin America’s America Móvil kept second and third rankings, but India’s Bharti Airtel replaced Telefónica at No. 4, and it’s within spitting distanced of breaking into the top 3. Asian operators China Unicom, China Telecom, Indonesia’s Telkomsel and India’s Idea Cellular all rose in the rankings. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile-owner Deutsche Telekom, and Russia’s VimpelCom and Sistema groups all fell in the chart.

Every single one of these carriers saw its customer base grow, but in general Asian operators saw much faster growth. That makes sense since many Asian countries are still far from reaching the mobile saturation levels of the west.

The big exception was France Telecom, which fell off the list completely last year but returned in the No. 12 slot. Though on paper FT’s total global subscribers by 57 percent, that performance has more to do with Wireless Intelligence’s methodology than any spectacular performance by FT’s Orange properties. WI only counts connections if a carrier group owns a majority stake in an operator (for instance Verizon’s subscribers don’t count toward Vodafone’s total). FT recently upped its ownership in several operators over 50 percent, which accounts for the huge subscriber boost.

It’s also important to note that connections don’t always translates into revenues. Verizon and AT&T rank 16^th and 18^th in total connections respectively, but they’re Nos. 2 and 3 in total revenues. In terms of revenues, Verizon is larger than its parent Vodafone, even though Vodafone has more than three times as many customers. As Wireless Intelligence points out, North American operators have a particular knack for making more money on each connection.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Kittisak

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